'The Cape' continues quest for justice

Pictured from "The Cape" are stars David Lyons as Vince Faraday/The Cape (left), and James Frain as Peter Fleming/Chess (photo by Jordan Althaus/NBC)

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Behind the Screens with Joshua Maloni

Fans of NBC's new superhero
skein "The Cape" know framed police officer Vince Faraday is bound and
determined to clear his name and reunite with his family. While it's unlikely
the former will happen anytime soon, star David Lyons says the latter is
possible.

"There is - well, I don't want
to give too much away, but there is - I mean, in this situation, what we're
seeing with the journey of Vince Faraday is one man who's fighting to get his
family back and to clear his name, in doing so realizing the importance that
his role is becoming in an environment that is becoming increasingly more
corrupt," Lyons says. "So there is that pull towards family, and then there is
this other pull, which is dragging him from society away from his family.

"And I can tell you that he does
come into communication with his family on certain levels. And I can't give too
much away, but we will see the cracks in his obsession to appear and trying to
figure out how to juggle these two things - these two burning wants that he
wants."

And what he wants, besides his
family back, is to clear Palm City of the evil Chess - aka defense contractor
turned Marshall lawman Peter Fleming (James Frain) and underworld heavies such
as Scales (Vinnie Jones).

"As we get the scripts, the
world opens up so vastly that one man's obsession - Vince Faraday's obsession
with Chess and Peter Fleming and (to) bring that man to justice is circumvented
somewhat by other scenarios," Lyons says. "There's the rise of Scales, there is
the ensuing violence that takes hold of Palm City. ... There's a lot of frustration in the way Vince approaches it,
which kind of bleeds out in his relationships with other people. I mean, he's
an obsessive man that's kind of - as we grow through the episodes, that each
week that we see him doing something that is not directly family-related or
getting back on track to getting his family, he becomes more and more - I
suppose more and more curtailed by circumstance, which is - bleeds into that
frustration that he feels as a character."

At
the heart of the show, Lyons says, is "the everyman that's fighting
back; one guy against the corruption and the evil of a multinational
corporation whose - the face of which is Peter Fleming. And I guess in terms of
the modern world, the symbology is fairly rich in those terms.

"He was a family man with
everything taken away from him, and in an archetypal David-and-Goliath-type
struggle."

While Vince Faraday may spend
his nights as The Cape, a masked, cloak-throwing vigilante in the mold of
Batman, Lyons says, "The way I
approached the script was the same way I approached the character - was not in
terms of being a superhero. It was in terms of being a family man that's torn
away from everything that he loves and he's using this last vestige of hope in
order to get it all back."

Of course, The Cape, himself, is
a symbol of hope for those in Palm City. And in taking on the role of a comic
book superhero, Lyons has no doubt opened the door for future employment in the
action/adventure and sci-fi realms. But the actor says he's too busy filming
"The Cape" to think about that right now.

"Well, it's been interesting,
because I'm still very much hard at work," he says. "So for 14 hours a day, I'm
still on set. So I haven't really managed to get out there and see what the
reaction is.

"But in terms of friends and so
on, I mean, it's a very, very different role from anything else I've ever
played. It's a much more physical, much more angry and obsessive role than
anything I've ever played, so it's been really interesting in that. And then
what we're doing now or what I'm - that is coming through in the character,
Vince, is a lighter side, and so trying to combine those two - the man and the obsession.

"But in terms of the response
and so on, it won't be until my head comes - surfaces from beneath the water in
March that I'll really know what, if any, the effect has been."